ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1985 I was a temporary clerical worker. Days I worked at a law firm in downtown San Francisco, using an electronic typewriter and experiencing first-hand the changes that have come about with the electronic office. Nights I was a data entry clerk at a large, cavernous VDT center, also run by a San Francisco law firm, but blocks away from its downtown office. My job as a word processing secretary involved the traditional variety of tasks that legal secretaries do, typing, filing, answering phones, photocopying and mailing forms. My job as a data entry clerk involved nothing more, however, than routine keyboarding; for six hours a night I, and six other operators, processed thousands of forms, first by calling the forms up electronically by number, then by entering dates and numeric codes onto appropriate lines. While we talked occasionally, what struck me most about the VDT center was how quiet work had become and how people kept at their work despite the monotony and seemingly lax supervision.
